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Dessert

Manse Marmalade

A marmalade made from sliced oranges and lemons boiled with water and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Manse Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Slice the oranges and lemons very thin.

  2. Pour the water over the sliced fruit and let it stand for 36 hours.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Boil the mixture for about 2 hours.

  2. Add the sugar and boil quickly until it reaches a jelly consistency, about 30 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Naval oranges
Provide the bulk of the fruit, bitter peel and pectin for setting and flavour.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin, helping the marmalade brighten and set.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens and, with boiling, concentrates the mixture so it sets to a jelly.
Water
Softens the sliced peel during the long soak and extracts its flavour before boiling.

The step that matters

Boil quickly after adding the sugar. Sugar must be dissolved and the mixture brought to a fast boil so it reaches the gel point. Boiling too long or too gently can make the marmalade overly dark or fail to set.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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